Cold cases: Missteps during investigation exposed

Jul. 27, 2013

Carol Jean Pierce disappeared in September 1975 and was never seen again. Police consider the case a homicide and suspect her husband, but no arrest has been made. Carol Jean Pierce photos submitted to Post-Crescent July 9, 2013

Richard Gale Pierce celebrates his retirement from the Coast Guard two weeks after his wife's disappearance in 1975. He is pictured with his mother and Carol Jean Pierce's mother. Immediately after retiring he took the trailer he and his wife had lived in and moved to Cheboygan, Mich. Carol Jean Pierce photos submitted to Post-Crescent July 9, 2013

When does a missing persons case become a murder investigation?Police say every case is different, but missing persons cases become murder investigations when there is reason to suspect foul play and there remains no sign of the victim as time passes. Such cases have even been successfully prosecuted hundreds of times. Nationwide, nearly 400 “no-body” homicide cases were prosecuted through the end of 2012, according to Thomas DiBiase, a former federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who maintains an ongoing database on his website. His research shows 89 percent of the 378 no-body trials resulted in convictions. In the Carol Jean Pierce case, police are investigating it as a murder due to lack of alternatives and the actions of the prime suspect, investigators say. Pierce’s case was initially treated as a missing person’s investigation when her husband, Richard Gale Pierce, reported her missing in Sturgeon Bay in 1975. But his claims that she left him didn’t match her letters and other actions. Carol Jean Pierce has still not been located. Retired police Lt. Tom Baudhuin, who committed more than 5,000 hours to Carol Jean’s case from 2004 to 2011, said he is confident Carol Jean is dead because she has had no contact with family and his searches through data from law enforcement, Social Security, passports, employment and hundreds of other sources turned up no trace of her. And he is confident Richard Gale Pierce is responsible because of the lack of cooperation and the evidence contradicting Pierce’s claims that his wife had been threatening to leave.

Richard Gale Pierce still lives in the trailer he had lived in with his wife in Sturgeon Bay, though it now sits in Cheboygan, Mich., and has been built up with numerous additions. The three-sided outcropping next to the deck (at right in top picture, at center in bottom picture) is the front of the original trailer home. Carol Jean Pierce photos submitted to Post-Crescent July 9, 2013

Richard Gale Pierce still lives in the trailer he had lived in with his wife in Sturgeon Bay, though it now sits in Cheboygan, Mich., and has been built up with numerous additions. The three-sided outcropping next to the deck (at right in top picture, at center in bottom picture) is the front of the original trailer home. Carol Jean Pierce photos submitted to Post-Crescent July 9, 2013

When Richard Gale Pierce told police his wife had disappeared — fulfilling threats to leave him — they took him at his word.

The initial two-sentence report filed by the Sturgeon Bay Police Department in 1975 relayed Pierce’s account that his wife had “taken off.”

A two-page supplementary report a month later noted Pierce did not suspect foul play and that the couple’s trailer had been checked for clues that 35-year-old Carol Jean Pierce “may have had an accident and fallen off the ledge.” It mentioned several other people who thought Carol Jean could have taken off as well.

The Sturgeon Bay woman has never been found.

Today, investigators believe Carol Jean is dead and have identified her husband as the suspect, but no charges have been filed despite a grand jury investigation, assistance from the state Attorney General’s Office and the work of a police investigator who logged more than 5,000 hours on the case from 2004 to 2011.

Murder cases are among the most scrutinized and significant tasks police undertake, but case accounts from the past and present reviewed by Gannett Wisconsin Media detail investigative missteps. As a result, cases like Carol Jean’s can go unsolved for decades, and errant assumptions can lead to convictions of innocent people.

Sturgeon Bay police are hesitant to cast blame on the initial investigators — pointing to a relative lack of training, technology and manpower in the 1970s — but they say the Pierce case might have had a different outcome if the first officers addressed it properly.

“I wasn’t in law enforcement back then, so I would hope that’s not the way that they generally investigated missing persons, but I guess that’s the way this one was done,” said Sturgeon Bay Sgt. Greg Zager, who oversees the Pierce case now. “If we have a missing person case right now, we will devote all our time and effort, or a lot of it, to finding that person, and we won’t just let it go.”

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Sturgeon Bay Police Chief Arleigh Porter, who in 1982 was the first investigator to seriously examine the case, was less diplomatic: “They blew it off, quite frankly.”

A 'disheartening' result

Sturgeon Bay police treated the Pierce case as a domestic dispute, even though evidence gathered years later showed that running off would have been inconsistent with her other statements and actions, according a search warrant affidavit filed to support a 2008 search of Richard Pierce’s property in Cheboygan, Mich.

Carol Jean disappeared two weeks before Richard Pierce retired from the U.S. Coast Guard, and in letters to her mother, she expressed excitement about retiring and moving to Michigan. She even borrowed $100 from her mother to buy a Coast Guard ring as a retirement gift for her husband.

Zager said Richard Pierce, who is now 77 years old, has been the lone suspect for more than 30 years. The court affadavit details the circumstantial case assembled by police, built around inconsistent statements made by Pierce and letters that showed Carol Jean was unlikely to leave on her own accord.

“I’m not sure where (the body of) Carol Jean is at right now, however, I do believe that Richard Pierce is responsible for her disappearance,” Zager said.

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Between the day Carol Jean reportedly disappeared and the day her husband reported her missing at the prompting of her mother, Richard Pierce took an unplanned trip to Cheboygan, police say. Investigators gathered enough evidence in 2008 to obtain a limited search warrant for the property, where the trailer remains with many additions built around it. Cadaver dogs had no success in finding a body, and the search warrant didn’t allow police to cause damage by digging under the buildings.

When reached by phone this month, Richard Pierce did not respond to questions about his wife’s disappearance and said, “I’ve said everything to (police) I’m going to say.” He referred comment to his attorney, Mike Hackett, who would not discuss the case. In a 1982 interview with police Pierce denied ever committing an act of violence against his wife, according to the 2008 search warrant affidavit.

Carol Jean’s brother, Brian Fillion, 65, said he is “totally convinced” Richard Pierce should be charged with Carol Jean’s murder. He believes she was killed in Sturgeon Bay before her body was moved to the couple’s property in Cheboygan, a belief shared by police and reflected in the affidavit.

“It’s frustrating to know it wasn’t taken seriously at first, and then it was really hard to do any concrete investigations starting six or seven years later,” Fillion said.

Within weeks of Carol Jean’s disappearance, the potential crime scene was gone, as Richard Pierce took it with him in a post-retirement move to Cheboygan.

The case came closest to prosecution in 2011 when the Attorney General’s Office looked into it, but without explanation they declined to prosecute, said retired Sturgeon Bay police Lt. Thomas Baudhuin.

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He had taken up the cause in 2004 and drastically expanded the case from what a grand jury considered in 1987, when the Door County district attorney dismissed the jury without seeking an indictment since he didn’t feel the evidence was sufficient. Baudhuin committed 5,000-plus hours to hundreds of interviews as he expanded the case file from an inch thick to more than 70 pounds.

Fillion said the assistant attorney general assigned to the case, Dave Wambach, told him there was enough evidence to charge and convict Richard Pierce, but the decision not to pursue the circumstantial case came from higher up the chain. Wambach, now a Jefferson County judge, declined comment, and spokeswoman Dana Brueck from the Attorney General’s Office declined to provide details on why the case was not prosecuted.

Baudhuin said he decided to retire the day the decision not to prosecute was made, having put it off for years to pursue the case.

“I was that confident we were going to make an arrest on that file,” Baudhuin said. “It was extremely disheartening. … I think about Carol Jean Pierce every day, and I’ve been retired for two years here.”

Assumptions can be problematic

Homicides wind up in cold case files for a variety of reasons, including the use of faulty techniques by police, said Keith A. Findley, co-director of the Wisconsin Innocence Project, which has represented several convicted murderers who were later exonerated.

Findley, who was not addressing the Carol Jean Pierce case, said most investigative errors stem from mental distortions that color how a case is perceived, commonly called “tunnel vision.”

“They may not realize it for a long time, and by the time they figure it out, the trail has gone cold, the evidence is lost, the witnesses are gone, so they can’t make a case,” said Findley, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “In most things we do in life, those kind of cognitive processes serve us well, because they help us make decisions and reach conclusions and steer us in directions in a way that’s more efficient. … The problem is that when our initial theories are wrong it can lead to disastrous results.”

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Family members of a Sheboygan murder victim say a wrong initial assumption also devastated the investigation into the 2001 death of 48-year-old Russell F. Beck. Twelve years later, Beck’s murder remains unsolved.

Police and a deputy coroner at first believed Beck died of alcohol poisoning, so the scene was left open for more than a day until authorities discovered he had died of multiple blows to the head, according to accounts from his family and neighbors. A detective gave one neighbor keys to Beck’s apartment the day of the murder and said Beck’s family was on the way, prompting her and others to clean the residence and remove a blood-stained carpet.

“It’s crazy that they had to clean it up right away. It doesn’t make any sense,” said Beck’s sister, Jennifer Westphal, 58, of West Bend. “The frustration was that it wasn’t treated like a crime scene. … They let the crime scene be tampered with.”

In a 2002 interview, Sheboygan Deputy Chief Robert Wojs would not acknowledge that mistakes were made by police in the Beck homicide investigation, but said, “In hindsight, there were some things that were done that I wish had been done differently.”

David Harris, author of “Failed Evidence: Why Law Enforcement Resists Science,” said there is significant room for error in many of the primary tools police use to assemble cases, including eyewitness identification, interrogations and even forensic science such as fingerprints and ballistics.

Eyewitness identifications can easily be influenced by the presentation and the pressure to identify someone, and they are the most frequent cause of wrongful convictions, he said. Interrogations — particularly the nine-step Reid technique used by many in law enforcement — can lead to false confessions when police apply pressure based on wrong initial assumptions. And forensic science remains largely reliant on human interpretation, meaning that while largely accurate, it is not flawless.

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Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said police have proven resistant to implementing best practices in those fields.

“What happens is you may be convinced of a particular theory of the case, and begin to focus on the evidence that supports that theory and to either discount or exclude evidence that either doesn’t support it or points in a different direction,” Harris said.

Was justice served?

Findley said tunnel vision can also lead “the most well-meaning investigators to let small errors … snowball into what appears to be massive evidence pointing to the wrong person.”

Mike Piaskowski said that’s what led to murder convictions for him and five other men.

Piaskowski, 64, of Green Bay, was one of six people convicted in the 1992 murder of Tom Monfils, who was found dead in a pulp vat at James River Corp. paper mill in Green Bay days after calling police to report a co-worker planned to steal a piece of electrical cable. The co-worker, Keith Kutska, later discovered Monfils was the tipster, and police said he and Piaskowski were part of a group that confronted and beat Monfils, then tossed him in the vat with a 50-pound weight tied to his neck.

“It’s absolutely the most horrible, the largest miscarriage of justice in Wisconsin history, maybe the entire United States,” Piaskowski said in a recent interview. “We were convicted of a crime that never happened.”

The other five men have been unsuccessful in their appeals and remain in prison. But Piaskowski was exonerated in 2001 after a series of appeals ended with the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling “the record is devoid of any direct evidence” of Piaskowski’s involvement.

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He is one of 10 people in Wisconsin exonerated after a murder conviction, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. It lists 530 murder exonerations nationwide.

But John Zakowski, who prosecuted the Monfils case and now serves as a Brown County judge, vehemently disputes Piaskowski’s claims. He said the attorneys defending the conviction when Piaskowski appealed didn’t present all the facts the jury heard, and he firmly believes all six men were involved in Monfils’ death, including Piaskowski. He said the case made in the book is the same one the defense presented and the jury rejected in convicting all six.

“The jury reached the only logical, reasonable conclusion based on the evidence,” Zakowski said.

Piaskowski said he thinks police believed their theory on how the murder happened, but stuck to it too stubbornly despite a lack of evidence.

Findley said that is typical in exonerations.

“I don’t think it happens very often that law enforcement goes out to deliberately frame an innocent person,” Findley said, without addressing the Monfils case specifically. “Police and prosecutors believe they have the right guy and think they’re just sort of helping along the cause of justice by breaking the rules a little bit.”

— Eric Litke: 920-453-5119, or elitke@gannett.com; on Twitter: @ericlitke. Includes material from Reporter Josh Lintereur of The Sheboygan Press.